


oh God, I want a wild contrast and a beating heart

by TolkienGirl



Series: All That Glitters: Gold Rush!AU [24]
Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Angst, Gen, Guilt, Noldolante, Poetry, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Songs, all the poetry is by moi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-26
Updated: 2019-03-26
Packaged: 2019-12-18 04:18:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,200
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18242237
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TolkienGirl/pseuds/TolkienGirl
Summary: Maglor writes the damn thing too many times.





	oh God, I want a wild contrast and a beating heart

_I heard a voice on the wind_

_(was it mine)_

_Turn the key, let it in_

_(was it kind)_

_It was mine, and unkind_

_Or too kind to be mine_

_That’s the way, the way of the wind_

He has thought of burning it. The unwieldy thing, strapped to the back of the sturdiest packhorse, wrapped in oilcloth and unstrung, has survived longer than—

Hope, and everything else.

Now, with their wagons, he can let Curufin drive. Curufin _wants_ to, very badly, and Maglor has his own unspoken reasons for distracting him. With someone else at the reins, Maglor sits under the stretched canvas, rocking with the wheels, settling the familiar bulk between his arms and legs.

Athair paid the finest craftsman in the country—according to Athair—to make the _claírseach._ He was a man with only one eye; the other had been bayoneted in the second war, the war during which Athair had been a boy, and Grandfather Finwe had been a hero.

 _Lucky_ , Athair said angrily. _They take half a man’s sight, and ask him to count his blessings._

Maglor rests his forehead against the smooth wood. It is polished; uncracked, unburnt. Grandfather Finwe had a voice like the lowest string.

Grandfather Finwe is now in heaven. Maglor is still getting used to the idea of being damned.

( _Are we?_

This, to Maedhros, two nights ago, when he was tired enough to speak like a child again.

 _Damned?_ Maedhros lifted an eyebrow. It made him look like Athair, but with Mother’s tired mouth. _Go to sleep, Maglor. I’ll worry about hell for the both of us._ )

 

 _why poetry_  
_why not a litany_  
 _of all the dreadful deeds_  
 _and the aching needs_  
 _that have stabbed their way through me?_  
 _why not in prose_  
 _an essay, I suppose_  
 _a string of words to firmly close_  
 _the space between the bruises and the blows_  
 _why listen hard_  
 _for sentences already come apart_  
 _and secrets under guard_  
 _why save your breath?_  
 _you’ll find you need it not at all, in death._

“What in God’s name is that about?”

“I think you know.” Maglor glares at Celegorm, who is plucking a pheasant beside the fire-pit. “Someone has to remember it.”

“Right, because we’re all in so much danger of forgetting.” Celegorm scratches his nose with a scarlet hand. “You’ve got to go and write a shit song about it, because you think you’re _better_ than the rest of us.”

Maglor wants to punch him, but he doesn’t. His hands tighten around the hidebound journal in his lap. This, Mother brought with the harp-strings. “When you kill a man”— _two_ —“You can decide how much better you feel.”

Celegorm spits in the dust.

Maglor hopes Curufin isn’t eavesdropping. Maedhros was—he’s napping close by beneath one of the wagons, or pretending to—but they didn’t say anything that Maedhros doesn’t already know.

 

 _sometimes I think we were made for greed_  
_all the mentioned men, and the way they bleed_  
 _and last long call of a fighting chance_  
 _this is war in a word, in a canted glance_  
 _this is weariness, in a stooping spine…_

“Would it kill you to make it a sea shanty? Something to dance to?” Maedhros’s voice is so dark and bitter that Maglor bites deep into his lip, choking back— _something_.

“I didn’t mean to wake you.”

“Well.” A muffled sigh. “You were singing. We are sleeping in the same wagon, _cano_.”

“I have to confess it to… _someone_.” Even the night air will do. Even the wind that is not wind after all.

Maedhros kicks away his bedding as if he’s been trapped by it, suffocating. “Confess it to me, then. Damn it all, Maglor, you can’t live like this.”

“Then maybe I can’t _live_.”

He said the same about leaving Annabella. He is always like this—a flood of feeling, cheapened by his own heart. Does he even make a farce of death? Death, at his hands?

Maedhros drags himself up and leans against the closed hatch. “Sing me to sleep, then,” he says. He sounds a little too much like Mother for Maglor’s comfort, and in the dark, the angles of his face look very young. “Give me the worst you’ve got.”

 

 _except we stand, with one hand_  
_on the century’s latch_  
 _and we dearly love to command_  
 _pain and our heroes to match._

He keeps expecting—keeps _wanting_ , if only so that someone will punish him—Athair to appear, noiseless and absolute.

Perhaps Athair will strike him, knocking him into this infernal Kansas dust. Perhaps Athair will break his harp, melt his tin-whistle, burning the remnants of Maglor’s regret.

In fact, it is Curufin who finds him first, and Maglor has to wrestle him to the ground, while Curufin—looking nothing at all like a child—hisses, “ _Stop! Stop singing!_ ”

_family is a burden, gilded  
faith is just a compass, tilted_

(He scratches that one out as soon as he writes it down.)

_pride seems like such a swell of polished steel_  
_a breastplate for the heart, real and unreal_  
 _but really it is just another shield_  
 _and will not, to a sword-point, gladly yield_  
 _even in point of truth_  
 _I think we’re always wasted on our youth_

“We should pray for their souls.”

The sky is very blue. Maedhros’s hair flames bright against his pale cheeks.

“Maglor,” Maedhros says carefully, so carefully that Maglor will consider the subject closed forever afterwards, “I did not even know their names. I saw only eyes to shoot for.”

_we might begin in blood_  
_change the ending, and it’s love_  
 _let it remain the best it ever was_  
 _look at me and tell me it’s enough_  
 _I wonder if you know what I am speaking of_

Athair is standing beside him. Maglor thought he _wanted_ this, but he isn’t Maedhros. He’s a coward, and so he easily stands aside.

( _Yet it wasn’t you, who did—_ )

“Athair, I…”

“You sing of our hurts,” Athair says. His eyes are keen, as they always are, here or there or yesterday, but his voice is softer than Maglor has heard it in months. “You sing beautifully.”

 

_we are so much the sadder kind of souls_   
_the kind who riddle love with loveless holes_   
_and we have need of you and of your charm_   
_and of the way you arm with light, and so disarm_

Fingon plays too. The harp. The fiddle. Fingon is rather wondrous at the fiddle.

Maglor misses him, and it hurts. What must that mean for Maedhros?

_We have all spent some time on the brink of greatness_

_Wax hands, stone hearts, edged with lateness_

_Come to find a time_

_Run to time unwind_

_We have all swallowed blood and believed it holy_

_All run aground with our secrets only_

_Cast like stars above_

_Ruined like our love_

_There will not be a name for the things we left there_

_We will not be the same as the ones we see where_

_Our eyes meet the dark_

_And our hands come apart_

_With a fingertip in the wrong position_

_Folding joints in a grave’s contrition_

_Water, and a stone_

_Blink, and we’re alone._

With this, he considers it confessed.


End file.
